She was old; not yet an elder, but long past the bloom of youth. Her hair was ragged and filthy, her face scarred by the ravages of childhood disease and a harsh life at civilization’s newly forged edge. When her lips curled back to howl out her pain, they revealed oddly angled, cracked teeth that had been used to defend as often as dine. Her scent was sour and dark, like the line of her mouth and the depths of her eyes. Her pendulous teats clapped together, their rhythm that of the frantic, lustful creature that had draped himself atop her.
She wasn’t beautiful, but there was *something* about her.
Not so, her attacker; he was an indistinct, brutal blur, raw greed and self-indulgence in the rough shape of a man. He was not the first of them to take her; she had been passed around by the band of raiders for… days? Weeks? I couldn’t say, nor, it’s likely, could she; her people observed the cycle of day and night, but they reckoned time in their bodies, in the demands of the viscera and the weakness of the bones. The starvation, exposure, and steadily escalating violence had therefore dismantled what passed for her clock, and she was left adrift in a strange, obscene, and eternal moment.
Whatever the true interval between the attack on her tribe, the murder of their men, the capture of their women, and her free-fall into the bottomless chasm of Now, it is enough to say that one more dirty, hateful brute stabbing at her battered flesh should have been indistinguishable from the last. And yet.
She was *special*.
It started long before the raid. Back with her people, on those nights her mother could not protect her from her father, or those days her father could not protect her from the other men; she had known fear. She had struggled, and clawed, and begged for release with all the strength she could muster. She’d become intimately familiar with a certain sort of burn and ache, and a rare, fleeting flash of something more terrifying still. Something that made her doubt the certainty of her senses.
So it was that she knew much of the desires of men. But the beatings she’d recently endured, doled out as entertainment… *those* were new. As were the open insults to her dignity: the way the bandits spat upon her, splayed her nakedness before the gods of heaven, and carved the wicked sigils of demons into her body. They didn’t care that she’d borne strong, brave babies, children who had harkened to signs and honored their elders. They didn’t care that her mother had taught her the special knots that secured their tent on nights when the indifferent wind roared across the plain. They didn’t care about the fish she could catch, the rabbits she could skin, the songs she could sing, nor the wounds she could mend.
She was nothing to them. But she was everything to *me*.
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